Puerto de Vueltas La Gomera

Puerto de Vueltas   

Having arrived in somewhat grey, overcast weather we were delighted when we were treated to blue skies in the morning of Thursday 16 November. We headed ashore to have a look around Puerto de Vueltas and, in particular, to find out about how we could get about on the island. The small town still has something of a hippy culture about it and it’s very much a tourist town with German hikers the predominant holidaymaker here. It’s certainly very laid back, with yoga sessions on the beach and a seriously long siesta in the afternoon. Even the fish [Ed: and there were lots of them] knew that they were safe in the harbour, “Yo man, feed the fish, don’t catch them!”.

We bought a decent hiking map of the island and discovered that the bus service was very good and geared up to getting walkers out and about on the island. That was actually excellent for us because if we had hired a car we would have been committed to circular walks always returning to the carpark.

We also found a small recipe book for Canary Islands mojo sauces. Most dishes in the Canary Islands are accompanied by one or more of these mojo (spicy) sauces which generally are of 3 main types: mojo verde (with parsley), mojo de cilantro (with coriander) and the classic mojo picón (with chilli).

Silbo the Gomeran whistling language   

Looking at the map and leafets that we had collected it was clear that La Gomera is an island of high peaks and steep ravines. We learned that this harsh terrain had actually prompted the early inhabitants of the island to develop a unique whistling language called Silbo. Amazingly it has a complex vocabluary of over 4000 whistled words and can enable communication at up to about 4 kilometres. It makes perfect sense; why climb half way up a steep gorge only to find that your neighbour is out when, instead, you can whistle from a few kilometres away to tell him that you are coming up? Once a dying language, this part of La Gomera’s heritage is now being preserved. It has been a manadatory school subject on the island since 2000 and, in 2009, UNESCO put it on the ‘List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’ which opens up funding to help maintain the initiative [Ed: we didn’t hear any Silbo when we were in Puerto de Vueltas but we did a couple of days later in San Sebastián.]

The anchorage at Puerto de Vueltas   

Looking at the weather forecast we felt that we were extemely fortunate. The weather was going to be very settled for several days and so we decided that it would be safe to leave BV in the anchorage at Puerto de Vueltas whilst we went ashore for a full day of hiking in the Parque Nacional Garajonay.

BV in the anchorage at Puerto de Vueltas   

Puerto de Vueltas, La Gomera, Canary Islands